Bridging critical and administrative research paradigms in the interest of a social and politically engaged African research agenda

Abstract

Amidst renewed and amplified calls for addressing colonialism in higher education in South Africa, calls that are increasingly reverberating throughout the global South as well as the global North, the challenge put to higher education is one of moving beyond the constraints of a higher education system shaped by the legacies as well as continuations and mutations of colonialism, and later apartheid and its aberrations throughout Southern Africa. Such calls are also calls for scholars to work towards a decolonisation of scholarship and the underlying epistemologies that informs scholarship, so that research is applicable to, and relevant for, the context that it serves. And as both a site and agent of transformation, the academy has a crucial role to fulfil to ensure relevance in both teaching and research, and scholars will have to take seriously their role as change agents.